Chapter Text
Jason’s life is split cleanly between what came before Ethiopia and what happened after, and right now, he’s at the point in his absurd resurrection where he really wishes he were still six feet under.
Damian al Ghul is rambling at him. Jason doesn’t know how to deal with a five-year-old rambling at him. He’s got a vague recollection of being good with kids, at some point – of helping them out in smog-filled streets and dodgy back alleys, of waving at them from rooftops and smiling as they hollered after him, Hey, Robin! You’re our hero…
The memories have a bitter taste. Green-tinged and distorted, his life before is something abstract and hard to reach. He remembers feeling like a hero, in a red-yellow-green costume that gave him something magical, that gave him something that endeared him to the worst streets of Gotham City.
Crucially, all that was before he died. And like everything before he died, his memories of the Bowery kids and his undying fondness for them are a blurry, unfocused mess in his head. Ergo, he does not know what to say when Damian excitedly talks about fifty different ways to kill a man with a teaspoon.
Damian doesn’t seem to care. He doesn’t ramble in front of anyone the way he does in front of Jason – they’ve known each other for all but six weeks, and already, the kid seems to have fucking imprinted on him somehow. Jason can’t figure out why. He rarely ever responds to Damian; his mind is somewhere else – smoke and dust and a ticking bomb, his mother’s arms around him and her tears mixing with his blood – half-wrapped around crazy pipe dreams of revenge and hurt and making Bruce Wayne suffer…
Which doesn’t bode well, giving that he’s currently tasked with babysitting the guy’s only son.
Jason’s hands are on autopilot, stripping a gun down to its bones. The parts line up neatly on the floor next to him – spring, slide, barrel – muscle memory he doesn’t remember learning. Damian’s voice washes over him, high and sharp, explaining how to sever an artery with a spoon. Jason stares at the firing pin and thinks about crowbars. Thinks about teeth breaking. Thinks about Bruce Wayne’s face when he realizes Jason Todd didn’t stay dead.
“–ello? Are you listening to me?”
Something hot and wrong curls in his chest, sharp enough to make his hands shake. He presses his thumb into his palm until it hurts. Six weeks ago, Talia al Ghul handed him her son and told him that Jason’s new primary objective was to look after him. Her words echo round and round in the space between his every thought; Help me make it so that my child does not have to become a killer.
He’s not sure if he gives any indication that he is, in fact, listening, but Damian leans forward in his lap and pulls at the white strand of hair curling into Jason’s forehead. None too gently, either. The world snaps back into place, sharp and real.
Damian glares at him – green eyes, not blue, but he still looks like Bruce Wayne.
“Are you listening?” he asks again, impatient as ever.
I’m listening, Jason wants to say, but the words catch somewhere deep in his chest, buried under dirt and stone and six feet of silence. He stares at Damian, and the kid stares back.
Eventually, Damian tugs at his hair again, harder this time. Pain flares, sudden and sharp, and something ugly rears up in Jason’s chest – instinct, reflex, violence. His hand jerks before he can stop it.
Damian sighs. “You are very strange,” he says, and something in Jason wants to laugh at his tone.
But he can’t muster up what it takes to smile, anymore. He spent too much time catatonic and reliving his death in multicolor and ultrasonic over and over again, and then he got dunked in the Lazarus Pit and infested with this terrible, burning rage that won’t let him go – but he has days like this one, still, where he’s just… empty.
The door to his room opens without sound, but he doesn’t need to hear it to know someone’s there. His senses have become unusually sharp since he woke up after the Pit. He knows Talia’s footsteps down to their softness and rhythm, and looks up to see her sticking her head into his room and smiling at the scene in front of her; Jason, disassembling a gun, Damian in his lap, relentlessly playing with the white streak in his hair.
He hopes she knows that he really doesn’t know what to do with her son. Jason’s mind is deadset on revenge, when it’s not busy pulverizing itself over endless memories of the sounds of his bones breaking and the Joker laughing over it all. Damian al Ghul wasn’t a part of his three-year revenge plan.
You are doing well, Talia mouths at him, and leaves again, as soundlessly as she came.
He’s really, really not. Phantom pain curls up his ribs and renders him unable to breathe for a moment. The brat in his lap keeps pulling on his hair.
Slowly, Jason draws his arms up and around Damian and hugs him close to his chest. He’s Bruce Wayne’s son, and Jason hates Bruce so much that it makes his vision flare green on any given day, but he doesn’t hate this kid. Damian is a child. A tiny boy that is about to be introduced to the arts of murdering people. In the League, the theory of death is taught for five years, and Damian is past that mark already. It’s time for him to get into the practical now.
Help me make it so that my child does not have to become a killer, Talia said, and it was a plea. Jason knew it then and he knows it now. Talia can’t openly rebel against her grandfather any more than she already did when she took in Jason as though he was her own – she’s caught between a rock and a hard place, because she can only protect Damian as long as she’s alive and sane, and R’as al Ghul is a little too good at making people not-alive and insane.
Damian sighs again, but it sounds more content this time. He won’t ever admit it, but Jason’s seen the way he snuggles into his mother’s arms – the kid likes hugs.
“You are my older brother,” Damian idly mumbles into Jason’s neck. “My mother says so.”
He knows, on some level, what Talia intended when she put Damian into his hands instead of a sword. She wants her only child to have a childhood where he doesn’t have to familiarize himself with all the ways to make the life bleed out of people – a childhood where he can grow up safe and happy, without the cost of his humanity along the line. Jason is meant to protect him from the ways of the League.
Up until now, Jason’s mind has been too hazy to really register what all that means, though. But in this moment, with Damian al Ghul trying valiantly to disappear into him, he thinks, unusually clearly, I’m gonna do it.
The Heir of the Demon is small and pompous and likes snuggles. Very dimly, Jason remembers that there used to be a kid in red-yellow-green hand-me-downs from his older brother that was very similar; a kid that got held at gunpoint and sold out by his own mother, beaten within an inch of his life with a crowbar and blown up in a shitty warehouse in faraway Ethiopia.
That kid is long gone. He’s only what remains, this rage-filled, half-mad shell of Jason Todd that’s been chewed up and spit out by forces he doesn’t think he’ll ever really understand. He’s not delusional enough to think that he won’t spend the next years learning the curvature of a blade down to its last inch. This is the League of Assassins, and they will teach him how to take a life without flinching.
And Damian is so young. So young, and so innocent still. In a heartbeat, Jason thinks he would do anything to protect that, if only because there was no one to protect him. His old life is dead, blown to bits and pieces, and he’s somewhat of an honorary al Ghul, if Talia has any say in it.
Ergo – he’s this little asshole’s keeper now, whether it fits into his plan of making his father break his code and prove that he really did love Jason more than anything, or not. There’s still Felipe Garzonas and Bruce’s refusal to believe him, to believe in him – there’s still the grave, Todd instead of Wayne, next to the woman that sold him out – there’s still the Joker, running free every other week. There’s still all those things that make Jason mad with rage.
But he tries his best to breathe through the green tinting his vision at the thought of Bruce Wayne, because the man’s son currently takes precedent.
“Yeah,” he murmurs, startling Damian a little. The kid jerks in his arms, but Jason holds him a little tighter, presses his lips to his hair, and Damian melts into him. “You’re my little brother. I’m here to protect you.”
To his feet, the gun is still in pieces.
Damian breathes and makes a sound that’s somewhat confused and relieved all at once, and Jason knows it. He knows, I’m gonna do whatever it takes to keep this kid safe.
But really, he has no idea what that entails just yet.